This Is the A. B. C

by K.S. Inglis

1st edition

[30 Day Return Guarantee] Price: AUD $12.50 ($ 11.60)

Book Description

Melbourne University Press, 1983. 1st edition. Hardcover With Dust Jacket (Plastic Covered). Very Good Condition, ex lib. 'As the bells in the tower of Sydney's General Post Office chimed eight o'clock on the evening of Friday 1 July 1932, the peals were picked up by a microphone and carried to every State of the Federation. This is the Australian Broadcasting Commission, said the announcer, Conrad Charlton.' The event so described marked the inauguration of a great Australian institution and these words introduce K. S. Inglis's compelling history of its first fifty years.<LB>Candid, independent and eminently readable, this work is the product of many years careful research by one whose undisguised affection for the ABC has not been allowed to cloud his clear judgement; on the contrary, it has endowed the story with a personal intensity. In a sparkling tour deforce Inglis shows us the ABC's triumphs and failures, its great medley of personalities and the effects it has had on Australian public life.<LB>The ABC was modelled as closely as possible on the BBC, but had always to live with commercial competitors. Inglis tells the story, over fifty years, of how government-appointed Commissioners and the staff they chose competed for the ears and,after 1956,the eyes of Australians, trying at the same time to attract large audiences and to offer programmes that were distinctive and not merely replicas of what the commercials were doing.<LB>Based on the Commission's own archives, never before opened up for research purposes except in a very limited way, on a wide range of other archival material, on newspapers and journals, on a rich assortment of interviews and on the author's own listening and viewing, this is social history of the very highest order.<LB>

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